<p>This thread is for all of us who have that one kid at our school who could go ANYWHERE.</p>
<p>In my case, he is a competitive runner and likely recruit for track and field.
In your case, they may be Native American, 2400 SAT and URM, or legacy.</p>
<p>And they will apply EVERYWHERE, crushing your hopes and dreams.</p>
<p>My question is: for elite/Ivy League schools, Harvard specifically, what are the odds that you will accepted also? Will they accept 2 or more students from a public high school?</p>
<p>“Boston Latin had been a top feeder school for Harvard, and has consistently sent large numbers of students to Harvard, recently averaging about twenty-five students per year.”</p>
<p>Boston Latin is a public school, but it is what Bostonians call “an exam school” (much like Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science in NYC). There is cutthroat competition to get in, so it might as well be a private school, a private school where money won’t get you in.</p>
<p>The year my son got into Harvard, 4 kids from his public school got in EA, and one more got in in April, so it definitely will take more than one kid from a school.</p>
<p>Yours is an oft-asked question: does XYZ college have quotas for any particular high school?</p>
<p>Ask yourself this: for what purpose? The only reason to limit accepts from any given school is to “spread the wealth” to other schools. But why? Is Harvard worried that they will offend some other school because they get zero accepts next year? Nope. </p>
<p>Harvard will choose who they want and from where they want. It could be five from your HS or it could be zero – it comes to the strength of the individual applicants.</p>
<p>They aren’t trying to curry favor with any high schools. My local HS a few years ago got four Yale admits – an extreme statistical outlier. The kids were just that good.</p>
<p>No quotas. If your kid gets rejected from Harvard, it won’t be because of that track recruit.</p>
<p>To follow up on the “to what purpose”: By November of your freshman year, nobody’s asking where you went to high school. It just doesn’t really matter any more; they’ll still ask what state you’re from, but arbitrarily “spreading the wealth” by that one metric would be to spread the wealth (and possibly dilute the awesomeness of the entering class) by a metric that stops mattering less than a year from now.</p>
<p>The thing about sports recruits is that they DON’T apply everywhere. They usually wind up applying only to one college, early. So their dream-crushing ability is limited.</p>
<p>Some can’t-miss candidates do apply everywhere, and I can be critical of that. Two classmates of my daughter’s applied to seven or eight other colleges AFTER having been accepted early at Harvard. Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a way to get more financial aid out of Harvard, but it didn’t work. Mainly, it was being jerks to their classmates. But most of the colleges to which they applied accepted at least one other classmate, other than Harvard. In my college travels with my kids, I met one girl who had applied to 27 colleges and been accepted at 24 of them (and the 3 were almost random). In her defense (a) she seemed legitimately clueless as to why her applications had been so successful, (b) she was from the Southwest and hadn’t been able to visit anyplace in the East before applying, and (c) she essentially hadn’t made any decisions, assuming that the colleges would make some for her, and they didn’t. I hope she didn’t freeze out any classmates, but maybe she did.</p>
<p>I agree with T26E4 that there are no school quotas. (Or, if there are, they are high and apply to very few schools. Harvard may be unwilling to take more than 20-30 people from Andover or Stuyvesant, for example.) Still, I suspect that one great candidate from a school can make everyone else at that school look a little worse. The great candidate shows how much it’s possible to achieve there, and other applicants come up short.</p>
<p>Athletic recruits do not compete with the regular applicants in the EA and they are essentially in a seperate pool. There are a set number of spots for each team and the coaches forward a list of candidates to the Adcom for final approvals. A lot of the athletic recruits are also legacies.</p>
<p>JHS wrote:
“Some can’t-miss candidates do apply everywhere, and I can be critical of that. Two classmates of my daughter’s applied to seven or eight other colleges AFTER having been accepted early at Harvard. Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a way to get more financial aid out of Harvard, but it didn’t work.”</p>
<p>Well, you “can” be critical, but it doesn’t mean that you are right. My son kept his other options open after being accepted EA to Harvard (class of 2011) because he wasn’t really sure that he wanted to go to Harvard. Yes, it was a very nice Christmas when he knew he had somewhere to go, but he spent most of April deciding if he wanted to go to a large school famous for not coddling its students or perhaps going to Dartmouth or Williams, which he liked very much. In the end, he (and his adviser and some friends already at Harvard) told him that he would basically hit the ceiling at the smaller schools, and that his research abilities in physics at Harvard would never run out. I was really on the fence about it (I went to a small school), but Harvard WAS the right choice in the end. His good friend and valedictorian of our high school) knew from the start that she wanted to go to Harvard (legacy on one side), accepted on December 18th, took her college senior year off, and really questions whether it was the right place for her. She’s going back in September, but is living off-campus, and never had any house pride at all (unlike my son).</p>
<p>People sometimes change their minds over their senior year, and just because the mention of Harvard starts bells ringing and choirs singing doesn’t mean that Harvard is the best place for everyone. Maybe the people you are speaking of were “being jerks to their classmates”, but that wasn’t so for my son (or my daughter’s good friend who got in EVERYWHERE, but decided to go to MIT and not Harvard in the end).</p>
<p>Neither student to whom I am referring had any interest in going anywhere other than Harvard. Neither applied to any school that represented a different sort of educational choice compared to Harvard. (Maybe MIT counts, but neither even looked at Dartmouth or Williams, or anywhere like them.) Ostensibly, they were trying to get the best financial deal they could, but each was offered significantly more money at another Ivy, Harvard declined to match it in both cases, and both still chose Harvard without hesitation. One of them was counting coup – that was the kind of person he was. The other was competitive with the first and basically did whatever he did.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone would have minded if they had applied to 3-4 other colleges that might have represented a different reasonable choice, or likely to offer them more money. When you get up to 7-8, without ever expressing interest in attending any of them, that looked excessive.</p>